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Anna Piaggi

Anna Piaggi, the Vogue Italia fashion contributor and style icon, was born in 1931 in Milan. Known for her exuberant and flamboyant fashion sense, she began her career in the Sixties as the editor of Italian women's magazine Arianna, before going on to become editor at avant-garde publication Vanity in the Eighties. Aside from her penchant for blue hair and eccentric outfits (always accessorised with a walking cane), Piaggi was best known for her work with Vogue Italia. It was a collaboration that began in the Sixties and saw her inspire the fashion world with her innovative and intellectual double-page spreads, or DPs.

Born to an academic family, she attended a boarding school outside Milan and, finding it too strict, decided to go on and work as an au pair so that she could travel and learn different languages.

She married the photographer Alfa Castaldi in 1962 in New York. She had met him while working as a translator for publishing house The Mondadori Group. He died in 1995.

Karl Lagerfeld, who has sketched her on countless occasions, Stephen Jones and Manolo Blahnik were among the fashion doyenne's friends and collaborators.

She met Jones in 1982 and chopped off all of her hair to make a canvas upon which the milliner could showcase his master creations. "Hats are like a halo of happiness," she said.

She played muse to Karl Lagerfeld who, during the Eighties,dedicated the book Anna-Cronique to her. She featured init as a comic strip character. The pair originally met in1974.

In 1978, Piaggi described fashion to be like a "trance",telling WWD: "It is a moment, an expression. My philosophyof fashion is humour, jokes and games. I make my own rules. I neverpick up something and just throw it on my back like that. There's alittle bit of study, and it's always better if I think about whatI'm going to wear the night before the next day. And what is to beavoided at all costs is the twinset look, the total look."

In 2006, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London dedicatedan entire exhibition to Piaggi and her style: Anna PiaggiFashion-ology. It attracted a record 25,000 visitors.

In 1988, she created the D.P. Double pages by AnnaPiaggi for Vogue Italia. They were an ongoing seriesof cult columns that lay down the law when it came to all thingsfashion and glamour.

She wrote a book called Fashion Algebra, which waspublished in 1999.

It is thought that Piaggi owned over 2,500 items of clothing.She is often credited with introducing vintage fashion to theItalian market. "I must say it is more economical to dressfrom the antique auction houses than Paris couturiers," she oncetold WWD. "I have dresses that should be in museums thatonly cost me $50.

In 1998, Thames & Hudson published a book celebrating 10years of Piaggi's DPs. In 2004, she told the Guardian shehad produced 6,500 pages of editorial.

If she could have been anything else in her career, Piaggiwould have liked to be a "new type of queen", according toWWD. "It's the theory of queenship that I dream of. I lovethe atmosphere, the clothes... I never think of money, just styleand power. My nature has always been to be superficial."